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Friday, 28 September 2012

This
week Write on Edge asks for “A little break this week from
storytelling.

“It's
the beginning of autumn, the students are back in the classrooms, and
at Write on Edge our thoughts are turning to our dreams and
ambitions. This week we want to hear about your writing goals. Take
three hundred words and tell us about where you want to take your
writing.”

I
took 289. To see how other writers handled the prompt, please click
on the link.

***

I want to take my
writing
into myself, to explore my thoughts and feelings and

out

into the world of
marvels and magic. I want it to echo
shouts and whispers; savour
sweet, sour and bitter; to shiver, and sweat, wonder and fear: to
thrill.

I want it to sniff
the
freshness of dawn's dew, recoil at putrefaction's stench. Delight.

I want us to travel
on
a packed and dusty train, lurching across the Sub-Continent's reaches
on a narrow-gauge track;
to slither
through a spider-veiled jungle
that sparkles with the eyes of hidden monkeys.

I want it to propel me
across a crevass-crossed glacier whose blue-white ice waves shiver
and groan and crack.

I want it to drag me
into the memory of aqua-melting-to-royal-deepening-to
navy-fading-to-black depths of the sea, where gold-fish flit
between sunlight and shadow and sharks and barracuda circle in the
deep.

I want to follow it
back to the emptiness of the desert, where heat waves bounce between
black granite and red and the sun chases a patch of shade around the
thorns of acacias and the nights' campfires send shadows flickering across
canyon walls.

I want to tramp behind
my words
through city streets as they catch the eyes of bankers and
cleaners, shysters and shop girls and service dogs, and peck
breadcrumbs with pigeons – in the rain, under the sun, through
drizzle, uncertain predawn, and twilight.

We will follow
cart tracks
and super highways and goatpaths that wind through Mediterranean
scree where the scents of bruised thyme and sage dog our footsteps and
caper bushes clutch at our legs.

I want to take
my words
to the farthest reaches of swirling space – all emptiness and
supernova.